Apple Inc. (AAPL) iCloud Service Down For Millions Of Users [UPDATED: Services Back]

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iMessage and several iCloud services have been down for several hours for almost 3 million users, reports Lance Whitney of CNET. However, the outage is affecting less than 1 percent of Apple’s users, according to the company’s status page.

Apple’s status page shows services offline

As of this writing, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s status page listed iMessage, Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud, Backup and iPhoto Jounals as being the services that are down. The status page indicates that the services went down at 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time. According to the company’s description, users might not be able to use the affected services or send or download attachments in iMessage.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) also said late last night that there were some users which could not create a new Apple ID.

Apple’s other recent outages

Apple Insider reports that iTunes and some of Apple’s iCloud services went down in June, affecting about 20 percent of the company’s users. In April, there was another iCloud outage affecting several online services.

Of course as technology increases, it’s to be expected that there will be more and more outages, even as more and more people expect services like iCloud to be up and working at every moment of the day and night. But this morning’s outage came during the overnight hours for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s key North American markets. Also it is smaller than many of the company’s previous outages since it affects less than 1 percent of the company’s services.

Most developers remember when Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s developer site went down for several weeks. The company took them down July 18 due to security problems. Some of those services were reinstated July 26, although most of them didn’t return until August 5. Apple’s iPhone activation servers also went down last month, so today’s so far relatively brief outage is a smaller problem than what the company has sustained recently.